The accusation that Israel is committing genocide is a defamatory inversion of history that transforms the Jewish people from victims — of the Holocaust, the genocide that gave rise to the term itself, and of Hamas’s genocidal October 7 massacre — into perpetrators. Perpetuating this charge requires a profound distortion of both law and fact.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishmnet of the Crime of Genocide requires proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group as such. Such intent may be inferred only where no other reasonable explanation for the conduct exists and must reflect a deliberate policy of extermination. The tragic consequences of war — including civilian casualties — do not meet this legal standard.

Claims of genocidal intent rely on the systematic misrepresentation of statements by Israeli leaders. For example, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of turning a “wicked city” into rubble — where Hamas was deployed — while simultaneously calling on civilians to evacuate, he was plainly referring to military operations against Hamas coupled with efforts to protect uninvolved Palestinian civilians. Similarly, when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Israel’s fight against “human animals,” the reference was clearly to Hamas terrorists, not to Palestinians as a people.

The genocide charge also erases the central fact that Hamas initiated the war on October 7 with an unprovoked massacre of Israeli civilians and mass hostage-taking. It further ignores Hamas’s systematic war crimes, including its deliberate strategy of maximizing civilian harm by embedding military infrastructure beneath and within civilian objects — residences, schools, hospitals, mosques, and even designated humanitarian zones.

Equally central to the genocide libel is reliance on Hamas-supplied fatality figures that inflate civilian deaths while refusing to distinguish combatants from non-combatants. Even taking Hamas’s claimed figure of approximately 70,000 deaths at face value, this represents roughly 3 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population — hardly evidence of an intent to exterminate a people. Israel reports killing approximately 25,000 combatants, yielding a civilian-to-combatant ratio of less than 2:1 — described by military experts such as John Spencer as “historically low for modern urban warfare.”

This is before considering that the Hamas data itself is deeply flawed, including natural deaths and fatalities caused by Hamas actions such as executions and misfired rockets. Hamas health official Zaher al-Wahidi even acknowledged that “a lot of people… died a natural death.” An independent analysis places the total death toll closer to 60,000, reducing the civilian-to-combatant ratio to under 1.5:1.

The evidence points to the tragic realities of war — not genocide. The genocide libel seeks to criminalize lawful self-defense and the unavoidable consequences of armed conflict. By advancing this charge, states set a dangerous precedent that undermines international law, rewards mass-atrocity terrorism, and strips states of the right to protect their citizens. That path leads not to justice or peace, but to chaos.

For a more detailed analysis, see UN Watch Legal Rebuttal: Disproving the Pillay Commission’s False “Genocide” Accusation Against Israel.